White O'Morn Cottage

More Sheet Music Paper Ideas for you...

                                                                   

I was lucky enough to be offered this lovely old sheet music on our recycle site jumbletown.ie. I have lots of great craft and repurposing ideas for it. So far I have used it as giftwrap for a gift for a friend. I also used it to line some drawers in the bedroom. Add a few drops of lavendar oil to give it a lovely scent and deter insects.

I also used it to decorate the deep windowsill of the bathroom in the cottage. These walls are 18 inches thick and they make for a real feature in each of the rooms. I will paste it down and clear varnish it as it is in a bathroom. Isn't it  pretty?

Vintage Irish Table Linen Gifts

 

 

There is nothing I love more than old Irish table linens. So when I got a call from my friend Cecil saying he had a bag of table linens that had belonged to his mother I knew I was in for a treat. This is only part of what was in it. (Cecil is the man who made me the lovely wooden items in an earlier post.) 

A Battenburg tray cloth

Hand crocheted doilies and tatted tray cloths

close up of same delicate beauties

This beauty has tiny shamrocks on. I'll be outlining them in emerald green for someone I know.

 

Adorable homemade baby pillowcase with skipping teddies embroidery. In pink and blue (must have been done before baby  was born!)                                                                         

A set of hand appliqued napkins with the tinyiest hand stitches I have ever seen. I have used macro setting as it was so neat I thought it was machined but...no...all hand done

  

And some hand painted traycloths. Most unusual.                     

       

...And this one is my favourite...  brand new French made waffle design vintage guest towel and the lilac/mauve colour is perfiect for the bathroom!                                                            

 Thank you Cecil. I love them and will put them to good use in  White O'Morn and share some with Angie in the Old Schoolhouse. Angie and I are the only people I know who actually use tray cloths...and it looks like I have hit the motherlode of tray cloths!

Green Gift Ideas

I always save pretty boxes from gifts and any tissue paper and ribbons and trims from any presents or anything I buy. When it comes time to do up a gift for someone else you have a stash to hand.Lace, trims and bows from old bras or knickers are also great to salvage and use on hand made cards and gifts. (...Here's one that was on me knickers earlier! :-) ...always keep a sense of humour - it makes everything so much more fun!

GIFT IDEA.... that is as green as can be... in your local charity shop you will find very pretty china cups and saucers. Wash them, polish them and pop a nightlight candle in, or a little pot pouri or a string of vintage pearls or beads(loads of these in charity shops for pennies ) do them up with your salvaged tissue, place in a saved gif box, wrap it in a scrap of fabric, or old wallpaper, tie it up with salvaged lace or ribbon. Make a handmade card or tag and you have a sweet little gift for a friend or sister. (These fine china cups are semi transparent and allow a lovely glow from the candle to shine through) fabric makes a great giftwrap. This small gift costs about 50c if you just count the money (and that went to charity) but cost much more in thought and effort. Just be sure to give it to someone of like mind..or they'll have you down as one cheap chick!                                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As promised - here is the finished scottie cushion. I used a pink gingham pillowcase, a piece of floral fabric from my collection of fabric and his doggie coat from red gingham fabric from a damaged baby's dress and two large white buttons for the closure from my button jar.

I am going on holidays for a week or so - I'll miss you all. See you soon...

A Grandma's treasure trunk

A lovely woman contacted me this morning through Jumbletown (the freecycle site we have here) to say she had a couple of old things that might be nice in the cottage. She had been cleaning out her grandma's attic and wanted to pass these on to someone who would enjoy them rather than her having to dump them. How exciting to go down to her not knowing what was waiting for me....

First these pretty pieces of vintage linens including a set of new mens linen hankerchiefs that Da will love as he never took to paper tissues. Also some damask tray cloths, pillowcases and pillow ticking fabric.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then this crumbling, dusty, moulding box....what could be tucked in here for decades?....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what I found when I opened it....

A lovely roses china tea set that had never even been unpacked from the box. It is in the dishwasher as I type. Gorgeous!...

(Here is the china used as a prop for this vintage shabby chic tea cosy I have listed on Ebay this week - item no. 170222471232  If it does not sell on Ebay it will be listed on my vintage website www.vintageretrolingerie.com)

 But the best was yet to come..........

........a large antique, dome topped travel chest complete with the old destination labels on it! I love it...thank you Mimi!...and thank you Mimi's grandma.

I will enjoy restoring it and using it in White O'Morn Cottage to store my bedroom linens.

The labels are hard to read but say Dublin, Westland Row (a city train station), and Shannon. I have included some close ups of the antique cobwebs and spiders that came with it. These are the before pictures...I will - of course, be adding afters.

Crafts from Rustic Roof Slates & Other Rusty Stuff

Here are some more of the nifty handmade signs I made from the old rustic slates of Angie's Old Schoolhouse roof. They had to remove some of them to put in a roof window.

They are natural slate - I think is called Blue Bangor Slates. It is quite beautiful in itself and it broke into interesting shapes. Also it is easy to drill with a fine drill if you need to hang it.

The Rose Room in basement of schoolhouse is one of my favourite rooms (I designed it - don't mind Angie if she says otherwise)

...so I made this little sign to go on the door.

The next one is a long narrow one - it is behind the rusty gate of the dry toilets at the end of the garden. In Irish it sounds so much nicer..."Leithris Tirim" so that's what I wrote on it.

The White O'Morn Cottage sign is also made from the same slate and I added a metal butterfly and some wire to hang it.

While on the subject of rustic even the garden shed has a rustic appeal...

...and can you spot the "rustic" almost disolved wheelbarrow in this picture? Shed door and wheelbarrow are both in Angie's schoolyard.

These tiny blue blooms are the Forget-Me-Nots in my cottage garden.

Nothing rustic about these pretty little flowers, I just love them. I grew them from seed last year and they are now running riot.

I have tried to get this picture before but could not get it just right. I wanted one flower in focus and the rest blurred.  Love these digital cameras!

This next one is for Kimme and Patrick...it shows the narrow boreen that leads up to the cottage  - the one I describe in directions as "has twists and turns and steep hills..." I hope you don't meet any traffic coming the other way! Don't worry, as the locals are well used to squeezing past on these very narrow lanes.

The photo was taken from the front door and has a lovely view beyond the trees.

Beware phone eating skips!

I have raided many a skip/dumpster in my day. But here is a cautionary tale about it...While raiding a neighbour’s skip one evening "Fingers Flynn" (me) was delighted to come home with a treasure but then could not find my mobile phone. I had a bad feeling it has slipped out of my pocket and into said skip. "So" - says I to my long suffering husband "We'll take the dogs for a walk and when we are near the skip you ring my number"

Well, of course it worked fine as I could hear a cheerful tune coming from the skip that had swallowed my phone. I was running around it looking for light from phone and managed to spot it right at the bottom of skip.

So I had to climb half in and poor hubby is holding on to me by the knees and the three dogs started barking and out comes all the neighbours to see what is going on.

I instantly froze ...but this only served to look like rigor mortis. So poor Paul looked even more suspicious and guilty stuffing a stiff woman into a dumpster.

All became clear when they realised it was just me. “I’m just trying to answer the phone and the signal is clearer in here” says I with a sheepish grin.

We all had a good laugh and I got my phone back but now if I even cast a sidelong glance at a skip hubby activates the childproof locks and growls..."DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!"

Scottie Quilt and Furniture Makeover

Today I was browsing through the quilting book Angie gave me and I found a pattern for a quilt featuring a scottie dog. I've never tried quilting before but this is so appealing and I have some lovely red gingham fabric for the dog jacket.

It said it was for beginners with step by step instructions and I am thinking of trying it on a cushion cover first to give to Catherine (she's our quilting sister) and she'll be mega impressed if I do this....Wish me luck!

...Thanks Angie, just what I needed...something new to obsess about! Guess what ye're getting for Christmas?

 

....and voila! Here is the finished cushion...I didn't actually quilt it just appliqued it as a trial run.....maybe I should try a quilt.  

Furniture Makeover

...and at last I have finished my wicker furniture makeover...I got this three piece suite about a year ago from www.jumbletown.ie one of the freecycle sites, with a view to making it into  shabby chic roses furniture. When I got it all the zips were broken, the wicker was gloomy and dark and the colour of the cushions was very dull. 

I could see the finished look in my mind and I made throw pillows to match from leftover fabric and vintage accordian pleat lace from slips. The fabric I used was bought on Ebay as vintage curtains. I did not even try to match fabrics. Instead I chose two rose prints with similar colours.  So -Roses is the theme and pulls it all together and the colours in the prints work so well that the throw pillows are interchangeable....I don't know why I took so long to complete this project as it only took a few hours in the end! Here is a close up of the throw cushions - I love how they turned out.

Repurposing - The Power of One

Today I entered a giveaway on a lovely lady's blog, Scented Candles from the Heart.  See sidebar. She asked us to say what recent change we had made to help the environment. This is what I entered.

Here in Ireland we have a chain store called Dunnes Stores and they use strong brown paper bags of different sizes when you purchase something. The bags have stripes and an old sepia toned photo on them.

I have started using these to package items I sell from my vintage website.  It makes a lovely vintage style parcel, very suitable for the items inside. They are stronger than the brown paper I was buying for this purpose and are also recycleable at the destination end.

I have all my friends and relatives saving me their Dunnes Stores bags so there is no shortage of them. Have a look around and see if there is something right under your nose that can be used or repurposed in a novel way.

We have a green campaign going on here in Ireland at the moment called "The Power of One" that asks "What one change will you make?"

I'd love to hear of any ideas you have

Repurposing a Beyond Repair Antique to a Garden Ornament

When I came acrosss this gorgeous antique but badly damaged teapot my first thought was to break it up for mosiacs to bling my birdhouse. But then I decided to try it out as an eccentric planter for my nastursum seedlings. I fill ed ith with compost and planted the seedling, then I tipped it over as if it was pouring because this allows the excess water to drain off down the spout. Lastly I just hooked the lid over the broken handle. I will add more pics as they grow and will probably place it in the cottage garden among the other flowers digging a depression in the soil to support it in this position.

Quirky, unique, free and green!